Gloria Evagelina Anzaldúa and Octavia Estelle Butler were two extraordinary women whose exemplary lives and visionary work have been a source of life-changing inspiration for many people across cultures. Both writers through their work advocated the eradication of rigid hierarchical binaries that divided people/s on the basis of race, class, age and sexual orientation. As lesbian...
Images are, and always have been, a paradoxical source of fascination and anxiety. Throughout cultural history, the sensory effects and illusory presence of the visual have frequently led to idolatry, iconoclasm, and iconophobia. Depreciated by Plato as mere imitations of the real, images own nonetheless an immense irrational force, expressing what Régis Debray describes as the...
It rained when I got on the plane in Toulouse. A couple of hours, a stop-over and few intermittent glimpses out of the window later, Istanbul finally stretched out underneath me: a panoply of Lego-sized rectangulars and a multitude of pencil-thin lines meandering to form the intricately designed pattern of an embroidered carpet, its broad blue edge sprayed with knotty, wooly...
I went to the land of sagebrush, towering pine trees, and clear blue skies, in 2010, to spend my sabbatical year in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, which has the major graduate program in the U.S. devoted to Literature and Environment.1 In the future, when I look back to this year, I will remember it as a meaningful time that gave me a unique opportunity...
Creating a true awareness of history, in the sense that Leopold mentions above, entails a far larger definition of history itself, one that would incorporate a history of environment together with human history. Although in his book Leopold was originally referring to experiences like boy-scouting, Robert Schenkkan’s 1991 play The Kentucky Cycle also, albeit in quite an ironic...
Hydrologist Robert Hawks has escaped to the mountains somewhere north of Denver to get away from the city and from his personal problems with his girlfriend. In the solitude of the wintery landscape the black protagonist of Percival Everett’s 1996 novel Watershed hopes “to fish and think and be alone” 4 . But what was planned as a Thoreauvian wilderness retreat quickly turns into...
The literature of place poses the problem of writing about what is beyond the self—and therefore beyond the immediate range of human experience— through the filter of human consciousness. This conundrum is most acutely felt in writing about wilderness, which, in the context of American culture, is generally conceived of as “an area where the earth and community of life are...
One may introduce John Muir in several different ways. He was an amateur scientist, a nature writer, an indefatigable advocate of the national park system and one of the co-founders of the Sierra Club. The so-called Deep Ecologists have singled him out as an early proponent of biocentrism Naess 33 . To many others he was a nature lover in the romantic vein. Such a pluralistic...
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic and wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to...
The Survey on Issues in Africana Studies collected data on the attitudes, backgrounds, perceptions, social contacts, and pedagogical practices of AfricanAmerican/Africana Studies professors. Using data from 221 respondents, I found that Africana Studies professors tend to see their programs as having a well-established place in the university. They report that enrollments are...
The war in Iraq is history. But its effects are still to be felt. Nobody knows exactly how many civilians were killed. The figures and numbers are more precise when it comes down to American casualties. Until today 4.400 soldiers lost their lives. Others returned home as cripples and emotional derelicts suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD . Their fate is widely...
From the inception of the United States, race has been a supremely defining characteristic for both the inhabitants of the colonies, and for the face of the nation itself. Those who were white, male, and Western European wrote: “We the People, in order to form a more perfect union . . .” while those who were indigenous were “Americanized” or simply annihilated, and while those...
The epigraph from Barbara Christian’s groundbreaking essay “The Race for Theory” 1987 articulates one of the most potent charges against the Black Arts Movement aestheticians levied by a contemporary black woman literary scholar and writer. This is a charge that has been revisited thoroughly by other critics such as Cherise A. Pollard, Carmen Phelps, Cheryl Clarke, and Lorenzo...
Consider the following clash of interpretations. In his recent biography of Ferdinand Smith, the Jamaican-born vice president of the National Maritime Union who like many other trade unionists with Communist Party affiliations, was expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO during the early cold war. Historian Gerald Horne argues that cold war anticommunism had a...
In his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk, African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois laid the foundation for modern racial theory through his conceptualization of double-consciousness. According to Du Bois, African American identity was based on “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in...
Africana Cultures and Policy Studies represents a revolution in the way Africana studies is thought of and applied. It takes the scholarship of the black experience and applies a multi-dimensional policy framework, producing solutions designed to improve conditions affecting Africana communities worldwide. In terms of intellectual production, there is a direct linkage between...
Since its inception in the late 1960s, African-American Studies has advanced phenomenally and is now integral to American intellectual life. African American Studies departments, Center and Programs are now permanent features of the educational landscape. During the past four decades, the field has had to overcome rejection, neglect and marginalization. Recognition, integration...
Africana Studies/Africalogy thrust itself in the late 1960s and early 1970s upon European university campuses in the United States as a direct challenge to European intellectual and cultural hegemony. Its central goal was to transform the intellectual landscape in the European academy by forcing the construction of knowledge in terms that, according to Karenga, were shaped in the...
Crash is a film for anyone who has ever introduced a thought or statement with the phrase, “I’m not a racist, but . . .” The “but” is usually followed by the thinker or speaker’s latest observations of other people behaving badly in some thoroughly stereotypical way. This film, using intertwining narratives, follows for thirtysix hours, much of it in flashback, a pair of thirty...
The impact of race and racism in American history has been noted and felt for five hundred years, but the influence of race and racism on American foreign policy has only more recently received attention. Borrowing from the innovative literary theorist Edward Said, historians Michael Hunt and Douglas Little have investigated a “hierarchy of race” that developed in the nineteenth...
American abolitionists during the nineteenth century invoked slavery in the Ottoman Empire as a means by which to criticize American slavery. In the resulting comparison of slaveholding powers, America did not come off well. Abolitionists mercilessly, and, this essay suggests, ironically, described slavery in the Orient as less oppressive than slavery in the West. This aspect of...
In Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America 2001 , Henry Yu observes the contradictory position Asian Americans occupy within western popular imagination understood as both a “racial ‘problem’ and as a racial ‘solution’” 7 . This dual role, embodied in the constructed images of the “enemy alien” and the “model minority,” has had significant...
In postcolonial literature racial and ethnic identities are not fixed but are subject to shaping and reshaping. Having been ascribed to and associated with cultural representations, nativity, rewriting of history, and reconstruction of identity, postcolonialism offers a space to discuss the issues of identity in the writings from the margins of the contemporary world...
This issue of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey explores several scenarios in which people in America as well as outside American national borders struggle against the influence and institutions of what might be called American racialized ethnicity. The concepts of race and ethnicity are not themselves politically charged, in that they, technically, do not connote, as...